In 1998, the
Algerian newspaper Liberté was seized by
police to prevent distribution of this article in France.
According to
Reporters
Sans Frontières,
on 19 October 1998, French police seized the 17 October
edition of the Algerian daily Liberté at Lyon
airport. No official reason was given for the move. However,
Reporters Sans Frontières believed it to be connected
with an article by Hakim Sadek entitled "When the Seine was
full of bodies". Liberté was publishing this article
to mark the 35th anniversary of a demonstration by Algerians
in Paris that led to an estimated 200 Algerians being killed
by police. Below is the full version of the article as
published by Liberté.

Maurice
Papon

The repression was ordered by
the same person who had organised the deportation of Jews
for the Nazis.

Was it only because at that
time Papon, whose staff were still imbued with the thinking
of their former Nazi masters, was in charge of the Paris
police? Was it because at that time France was still at war
with Algeria and there was no such thing as a good enemy? Or
was it rather because apart from any immediate circumstances
and reasons, hatred had reached bursting point? The 17th of
October 1961 was a date that marked the height of the
repercussions of that hatred which had thrown an
ever-increasing number of Algerians whose only crime was
their nationality into the murky waters of the river that
flows quietly through Paris. Because it had become common
practice to get rid of the bodies of Algerians - and
sometimes Algerians who were still alive - who bore rather
too visible signs of police brutality by depositing them in
the Seine. It was way of avoiding embarrassing questions.
During the summer of 1961 it was quite clear how the war was
going to end and some people in France were unwilling to
accept that thousands of workers with the dubious privilege
of taking on all the dirty jobs, those thousands of men with
swarthy features on whom they were used to venting their
xenophobic spleen, should be on the point of belonging to a
free, sovereign nation.

The provocation came in the
form of a police order that Moslem "citizens" of Algeria
only should be subject to a curfew from 8.30pm to 5.30am, on
the pretext that there had been a significant increase in
the number of attacks on policemen. Does it need to be
pointed out that the number of these attacks, at a time when
the first negotiations were signalling an end to the
fighting, was tiny compared to the number of victims of
"excesses" by the French police? The implications of these
restrictions on the Algerian community were such that the
leaders of the armed struggle in France organised a
response.

For quite apart from the fact
that it discriminated against Algerians, the curfew opened
the way to all kinds of abuse of authority, making such
abuses legal, effectively making it a crime to look like a
foreigner and forcing unemployment on the countless workers
who needed to go to and from their jobs during the
curfew.

As a result, history made this
one of the most tragic episodes in the war of national
liberation. And if the events of October 1961 were wrapped
in a cloak of silence in France, doubtless because they
hardly showed the French authorities in a good light, they
were nonetheless the subject of various investigations by
impartial observers and even nationalists who were ashamed
of the wave of brutality organised by their leaders and
carried on with matchless zeal by the "forces of law and
order".

All the above factors were
highlighted with a remarkable concern for truth and
objectivity by Jean-Luc Einaud. The author of La bataille
de Paris (1) came up with a huge number of eye-witness
accounts and documents - many of them previously unpublished
- to explain the significance and seriousness of what
happened in Paris that 17 October by putting it in its
political and social context. Details collected from
witnesses who were still alive in the official reports of
militants of the FLN French federation in the press at that
time tell of the scale of the tragedy, the immeasurable
horror of the sight of three bodies being fished out of the
Canal Saint-Martin the day after the demonstration, then
five, then seven, and finally forty. And there were so many
others...

The author does not make a
single statement that is not backed up by a piece of
evidence or an account by a witness. He even includes the
route described by François Maspero in Le
figuier, the views of well-known French personalities
such as Le Pen or Defferre, prosecution or defence witnesses
of behaviour which, as the Paris Bar emphasised, "violates
the most elementary notions of humanity".